Chance v. Design Part 4 (Evolution)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Friday, July 03, 2009, 19:26 (5620 days ago) @ dhw
edited by unknown, Friday, July 03, 2009, 19:41


> I'm sorry, Matt, but what this shows to me is that you're spending too much time studying dice, and are not studying the unique and therefore incomparable (see J. Rosenhouse) phenomenon of life and its evolution. - There's 2 issues with what you suggest here. - The problem here is, that to discuss biological systems and probabilities, you and I would have to be on the same page mathematically. That means you'd have to know some dynamics and chaos, and some calculus-based probability. I have to use the concept of dice because you've expressed a personal ignorance in the areas of math, and dice is the simplest way to begin a discussion that would built towards a discussion of stochastic processes such as life. - The second issue is that the *basic* rules of probability for dice also hold for more complex systems, and the types of reasoning and bad assumptions people make ALSO happen all the time when describing events under either discrete (dice) or continuous (biological) formulas. (Monte Carlo fallacy.) - The mistake I see you (and Dr. Turell) making, is an incredibly common one. Because some people have attached low probabilities for life arising by chance (such as Shapiro), you (and Shapiro) make one of the most basic errors involved with probabilistic reasoning--outside of the fact that our ignorance doesn't allow us to attach a probability on it with any accuracy whatsoever. To drill this point home, when given a probability, you *need* to ask what the assumptions were behind the model. With life, we don't know if life had an earlier, intermediate form, or in other words, life as we know it now may have been completely different--the PNA article *suggests* a different transmission mechanism could exist before DNA/RNA. We don't have an *accurate* idea of what our planet was like during the period when life somehow appeared--if it wasn't seeded here by some other event. We also can't define the beneficence of failed attempts--some failures might create chemical components that help the next event along. And--an important question to ask--what is the threshold that declares we have life from nonlife? This is just the tip of the skeptic's iceberg. - The mistake you folks appear to be making in probability is this: - Its one dealing with selection. Its what I was trying to tell you about when dealing with the dice example. Remember when I said that the probability of picking a specific event in the dice example gives you a probability of 1/36? The key to remember here, is this: Say we consider "success" as a Blue 3 and a red 4. There is only one such sequence in existence. The counter intuitive part about this is that we have an equal chance of getting a success and a failure, as any other state in the system (Blue 4, red 3) also has a probability of 1/36. Every time you roll the dice, you have the same chance. In other words, to say that we have a 35/36 chance of NOT picking that sequence--is false. Every time you roll the dice, you have a 1/36 chance. A roll of the dice is a causative agent of the various sums, which have a distribution that contains its own set of probabilities. But the causative agent is what we're studying here. (There's alot going on in even a simple dice model.) - You and Dr. Turell *appear* to say that since life has been assigned such a low probability (under specious assumptions) than there exists a converse selection against it happening. If life has a .00000000000150 chance of occurring randomly, it is not the case that there is a .99999999999850 chance of it not happening by chance. This simply recreates the Monte Carlo Fallacy. Every event has an equal chance of being selected.